Verizon

Revenue leakage among carriers is close to a billion dollars and as new services come on line, the complexity of managing various plans increases, potentially allowing for lost sales and profits.

To deal with these and other problems carriers face, Rev.io is working hard to produce new solutions for communications service providers or CSPs.

In an exclusive interview with Evan Rice, VP of Sales & Marketing, he explained the company has recently released its new REST API which is lighter weight than SOAP. The new developer portal allows test calls, an interactive developer portal and sample code in various languages.

Rev.io's new REST API gives clients and partners access to their usage-rating, metered billing, customer data, and inventory catalog via easy to implement integrations. The company hopes to expand partnerships and has encouraged other companies to utilize the REST API to create integrations with their monetization engine.

The new API Development Portal combined with an API-first architecture will allow Communications and IoT service providers to have an improved developer experience. Rev.io clients will be able to fully integrate with proprietary or partner systems, access a library of documentation, and enjoy the quality and usability improvements gained by moving from a SOAP API to a REST API.

IoT billing can get quite expensive as carrier plans do not always fit the usage pattern of devices. In a conversation with Rickie Richey, CEO of Altaworx, he explained his company has a SaaS-based solution which works with AT&T Control Center and Cisco Jasper. In one case, a customer with 19,000 tablets - many which get erased and reset frequently due to employee turnover was spending a great deal on wireless service. When they switched to Altaworx, the tablets started to get charged the bottom rate and per minute usage, for a savings of 15% or $600,000 per year.

Another customer is a car manufacturer with 230,000 SIM cards on the market across 56 carriers, adding 20,000 new SIMs per month.

Recently we wrote about how telecom resellers are becoming MSPs, providing UCaaS solutions on their own, without the need to rely on an OTT provider such as RingCentral or 8x8.

In our discussions with MSPs making the switch from reselling a hardware solution like Toshiba to providing service themselves, they tell us how happy they are. They are making great margins and have much more control over their destiny.

We just had an in-person interview with David L. Puckett, Director of Business Development at Yeastar and the opportunity just grew in our minds as we spoke.

The company has 100 engineers and recently devoted themselves to taking all their hardware smarts and converting it to software. The result is the Yeastar Cloud PBX which was launched a few months back at ITEXPO. It's a monster, based on the Yeastar Management Plane or YMP, supporting 100 PBX instances, 2,000 users, and 500 concurrent calls.

As telecom consolidation continues, a wave of mid-sized carriers are expanding their channel programs to take advantage of the opportunity to benefit from changes to these programs at the "big carriers."

One such company is BullsEye Telecom. Their Channel Partner Programs offer three new opportunities for potential partners:

Referral Partner: best suited for IT consultants and those who are connected with organizations that may benefit from BullsEye’s full line of services.

MSP Program: ideal for Managed Service Providers, VARs and system integrators; provides an opportunity to grow a stable and predictable revenue stream by referring BullsEye’s portfolio of services to their clients.

Agent Channel: for technology solution providers with sub-agents or seasoned sales representatives with a track record of selling technology solutions throughout the U.S.

The ability to grow business services offerings – including VoIP, SD-WAN, Broadband and POTS – from a single provider

Dedicated, hands-on sales and marketing support to help drive business

In an exclusive in-person interview with Mark Sondergaard, national director of partner sales, BullsEye Telecom said, “With our robust offerings, industry-leading benefits and proven success system, we are laser-focused on helping our partners grow their businesses faster and more strategically than ever before.”

Mark explained they are adding pre-sales engineers, and have added 4-5 channel managers as well. He said they excel in providing multilocation service including POTs aggregation, broadband aggregation, various VoIP flavors and of course SD-WAN.

He told me, they are one of the few companies which can bring on a one-thousand location restaurant and first take control of the transferred numbers via a POTs to POTs transfer.

MasterStream, the complex quoting engine of many of today's carriers has been successful at working with enough carriers that they provide 15 million quotes per month. Part of what differentiates the company is they provide complex quotes - based on specifications of the carrier and customer. They are leveraging this success and expanding into new and exciting adjacent spaces.

Their first new product, CarrierAccess allows a wholesale carrier to just manage their product catalogue for their provider customers. Instead of using a spreadsheet or portfolio can now have a single portal for everything they need.

After exhaustive interviews with 400 call center professionals and IT administrators, Jabra set out to design headsets for the evolving workplace. Respondents told them, automation was handling the easy tasks leaving the higher value phone calls to be handled by agents.

Also, as rents have climbed, office spaces have gotten smaller and noisier. Open office environments certainly have to be an issue as well.

According to a RingCentral report From Workplace Chaos to Zen: How App Overload Is Reshaping the Digital Workplace, when it comes to communications applications, workers today are using an average of four apps, with 20 percent of workers using six or more. This includes apps for phone calls, texts, web meetings, video conferencing, team messaging, and more. Sixty-nine percent of workers waste up to an hour each day navigating between myriad communications apps, amounting to a waste of 32 days per year.

To counter this app fragmentation, 66 percent of workers want a single communications platform that will bring a sense of productivity to their

On December 9, 2016 we made the following predictions. Some we realized were ahead of their time but we figured, it was worth taking a risk. Topics ranged from tech to the economy and even the strength of the dollar. We've scrutinized our results.

Thanks to RCS, rich messaging will be the default on all mobile devices meaning companies will have the ability to provide superior messaging and marketing to all customers according to Brian Heikes, VP, Product Mangement and Solutions at 3Cinteractive.

They recently launched some of the first campaigns on the Sprint network when they announced their RCS A2P deployment. Prior to this change, Sprint just allowed P2P RCS capability or person-to-person messaging. Now with the MAP solution, organizations now have the full power sending rich marketing messaging to all consumers.

In addition to the benefit of having RCS work on all handsets, its use allows companies to avoid needing to go through a BigTech gatekeeper who mines the data to sell competitive advertising.

In other words, if you look at the Facebook business model - the first step was to get companies to bring all their customers to the Facebook network by liking their pages. The next step was to charge companies for access to their own customers via algorithm changes and advertising.

The pace of change in technology continues to increase and if your company generates its income from helping customers deal with these advancements, it's up to you to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Moreover, you need a general awareness of the regulatory environment and what issues are being addressed by the federal government; now and in the future.

It’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Yours Truly (Rich Tehrani) will be giving a keynote presentation at the Ideacom 2018 conference in Washington DC, April 8-10, 2018. The focus of our presentation will be on what resellers and MSPs need to know to adapt to the changing technology landscape.